The Conscience of a Conscientious Objector

It's been a long time since a new poet haunted me the way William Stafford does. Here's why:

A MEMORIAL

In Nagasaki they have built a little room
dark and soundproof where you can
go in all alone and close the door and cry.

and this poem terrifyingly prescient of our dilemmas in Iraq and Palestine and all other places where imperialist and colonialist wars, for which we are main sponsor or biggest patron, are fought:

PRETEND YOU LIVE IN A ROOM

Play like you had a war. Hardly anyone
got killed except thousands of the enemy,
and many go starving, holding
their hands out in pictures, begging.

Their houses, even the concrete and iron,
they've disappeared. These people
now live camped in the open. Overhead
stars keep telling their old, old story.

You have this world. You wander the earth.
You can't live in a room.

This poem stunned me because it depicted the illusory partition between homeland and war zone where we count only our own dead who are so much less in number than the 'enemy' (combatants and non-combatants) who have been killed. And almost everyday, all we see of Iraq is bombed out market places and town squares. So the lines "Their houses, even the concrete and iron, / they've disappeared" impose themselves on our couch potato sensibilites. We cannot help but have this world. And so we wander the earth in pursuit of our armies and as anxious spirits praying for their welfare. (Thankfully, the prayers are being extended to protection from their might.) Yet evey day we know but refuse to accept that "You can't live in a room." The empire forces us into global cognizance. They ought to stage the next "Survivor" on the banks of the Euphrates. The challenges there are much greater than in Fiji.

Read these beautiful, discomforting William Stafford poems as soon as you get the chance. Be gratefully disturbed by them.